On, In and Around Mondays: Window Shopping

In Chattanooga, I walked past windows, shopping for memories. Every city offers this diversion, and I am a willing consumer. Ordinary words like "open" suddenly seem like treasure in neon, blinking, "look at me." I look. I angle my camera. I capture "open" and the reflected sky that is, itself, opening to night.



I find I can take my Jesus home on a band aid, should I prefer Him over BooBoo kisses adhesive bandages, or protective rainbow monkeys or fairies. He cooperates nicely by agreeing to sit in a tin next to a plastic alien figure who, herself, has preferred to stay in the open. The sky is still doing its thing, now peachier. There is still time.



Surely I am in need of a fishnet stocking lamp, or perhaps a blender with a green bulb, or maybe a wire figure... blue-bikini clad with long wild hair opening to imaginary wind.

In the end, by trick of a lens, I take it all. Greedy consumer that I am. I take the "open" sign, the sky, night coming on, Jesus and the BooBoo kisses, blue bikini-clad figure wild as John the Baptist in his desert. I take, too, the fishnet-leg and blender lights of the world.


Chattanooga Window photos, by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

On, In, and Around Mondays: Room with A View

It is Saturday. Writing day. Usually I am out on one of the porches, either looking towards hemlocks or the little herb garden where I have—amidst flowers—rosemary, sage and thyme. But today it is peach-yellow bedroom walls, antique carved wooden rocker, a pile of French children's books, and an eclipsed view of the river (trees in full leaf obscure it until winter).

My chest hurts and, oddly, my legs. Yesterday I thought I would be better by today. Instead I feel like I must have run a marathon and my muscles have post-workout lactic acid buildup. I did not run a marathon. I am simply sick.

I can hear guitar in the next room. "For me He died, for me He lives." It is the song for tonight, the accompaniment for a daughter who will sing her father's last request. We worshiped alongside her father for many years, prayed with him and, more lately, for him. He was not that old. His daughter is, I think, too young to have to sing this song.

Now I hear the strains of the final refrain, "And everlasting life and light He freely gives."

I am writing in my peach-yellow bedroom. The color cheers me, even as I lie here sore and headachy. In a few minutes I will pull my sheets over my shoulders and go back to sleep. I look out my window. I know the river is beyond the trees.

Trees by the River photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

On, In, and Around Mondays: Basil, Vines, and Possibility

Red notebook in hand, I sit near the little herb garden. It seems important to write in the place I am going to tell you about, rather than recalling it later at a keyboard.



And isn't it good for my soul, after all, to listen to the dance of hemlocks, maples and wind. This sound could be water if I didn't know better. Funny how things are more the same than we let them be.



The garden contains possibility— basil for red sauce, sage for French lentil salad, rosemary for new potatoes, chives for cream cheese (my daughters love to snip green stems with scissors).



Just a few years ago, this yard had too many views of trampolines, garages, tree house, chain link fence. But I have cultivated possibility, let vines grow, allowed branches to come between me and the neighbors.



Is that all it takes sometimes? A few short years of letting go... leaning into possibility... to find such as this? I get on my knees beside the little herb garden, push my camera towards beauty, and click.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? This week, consider writing something about your yard and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

On, In and Around Mondays: Tweety, Tea and She

I am in the living room.

Here are the signs that on Saturday we did our girls' annual combined birthday party: my guitar is turned towards the wall in its stand— evidence that a child must have been in need of deterrence. To my right, an African basket, big as the circle of my arms if I were to hug you, lies flat and displaced. Boys thought of boats or cars or a hot air balloon and were told by a grandmother to move on— baskets are breakable.



To my left, gift bags (one pink with hearts, one lavender striped) hold necklaces, drawing pads, Natalie Merchant (we'll be singing The Janitor's Boy now), "Safari" ceramic beads. A tea party book tells that we tried to do Victorian tea. The cucumber sandwich on its cover is far more artful than mine, which were put together hurriedly while I chatted with early guests.



A Tweety bird, who must have been hopefully given by a young child, is lying face down, lavender-brimmed hat to mahogany (faux) round lamp table. Tweety stares continuously at his reflection in shining wood. This might seem more narcissistic if he were not bowed in worship before a black and white photograph of my mother as a child.

She too wears a hat, black, to match her worn black girlish coat. Her milk-white skin frames dark, startled eyes and soft lips set apart in surprise or maybe fear. Shyly and intently, she stares into the room as if to say, I saw it all and I wished... I wished the necklaces and beads, the guitar, the African basket, the ride in a hot air balloon, the scones and tea had been mine.




Birthday Party photos by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)



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Claire, Kelly and Sarah just started a new photo place. Cool. "Home" is their first prompt! Go Claire, Kelly and Sarah!



This post is also linked to Emily's Imperfect Prose.

On, In and Around Mondays

"I'd love to see a few regional poems in the collection," I told him. "It's what distinguishes a poet."

The idea had been on the tip of my consciousness, though it was the first time I'd articulated it that clearly for myself (or someone else). I'd been reading Wendell Berry's Imagination in Place. I'd been reading two poets concurrently, Mahmoud Darwish and Marcus Goodyear. I'd been thinking about how the presence of jasmine and doves and chinaberry trees in Darwish gave me such a different feel from Goodyear's sotol sticks, succulents and open roads.

We live in place. And when we write in place it provides a deeper sense of who we are. It is partly what distinguishes one writer from the next. I was struck by this again when I posted On the Table Where I Write. A handful of you responded so warmly, even offering your own descriptions of what sits on your tables.

I loved that. It gave me an idea for a more regular way for us to write-in-place. On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) will be a regular invitation to write from where you are, and tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Mine, today, might go something like this...

At the golden granite counter, I stand and notice our white toaster flecked with crumbs. Cat in the Hat Beginner Spanish Dictionary sits nearby, and I remember this morning with Neruda. (I walked in circles over these red oak floors, stove to counter to sink to window, and tried to put his words in my mind... Inclinado en las tardes tiro mis tristes redes/ a tus ojos oceanicos... leaning towards evening I cast my sorrowful nets/ to your ocean eyes). Now my red Neruda sits beside me (I had to see if indeed my memory had held his words; it did). A wood handled hair brush says I just brushed Little One's amber hair. It says, too, remember LIttle One. She is part of your place in this day. It says I like to brush words from the air and put them in your mind. It says, hold me in your hand, I wait for you...

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Would you like to try? Just write something in place and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)


New York City photo by L.L. Barkat, which I am sincerely hoping has some kind of thirds or ninths thing going on for Photoplay. :)